As integrated circuit technology is scaled to provide increase chip, the on-chip interconnects become narrower and narrower. In addition, the height of the on-chip interconnects tend not to be scaled linearly with the width of the interconnects, thus making their aspect ratios larger. These trends lead to an increase in coupling capacitance with neighboring wires, which in turn leads to increased crosstalk between wires. Maintaining the signal integrity of a communication bus can therefore be problematic because of these degrading effects.
It is known to use repeater circuits for improving signal, integrity. However, the use of repeater circuits alone does not provide a solution to the problems mentioned above, since glitches can still occur at the receiving end of a wire, which can result in logic faults and higher power dissipation.